1 Yesterday I wrote about The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI’s) new rules about filtering the pesky messages being sent to customers from the senders who are not registered by Mobile service providers. The rules came into force from 8th March 2021, which created havoc in the country. On the very first day out of 1 billion SMSes per day nearly 40% dropped and on 2nd day the drop was 33%. Among top banks drop rate was 25% on day 1 and 10% on day 2.. Looking into all these chaos in the market TRAI suspended the implementation of its regulation to control pesky messages for a week. As per TRAI’s statement “ It has been observed that some of the principal entities have not fulfilled the requirements as envisaged by in Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 (TCCCPR 2018). Basically due to this reason, the result was SMSes getting dropped, so we are suspending the implementations of the regulation for 7 days, to ensure no inconvenience is caused to customers”.
Telecom companies on receipt of this communication from TRAI immediately switched off the filtration process yesterday itself in the evening. This action by TRAI will give enough time to telemarketers to get themselves to be registered, who have ignored the reminders in the past. As per the reports-Though the larger brands and telemarketers with advanced IT mechanisms in place are gradually catching up to the rigid blockchain filters, the smaller market players are struggling to do so as SMS content is dynamic. The blockchain based solution deployed by telecom operators checks the sender ID, called the header, and content of every commercial SMS origination from registered source. SMSes from unregistered sender IDs are simply blocked. In fact, the system automatically filters SMSes with even a small change such as the addition and deletion of a full stop.
As per TRAI, they will take corrective action after studying the situation over next few days.. All the telecom companies are working closely with enterprises and telemarketers by supporting them to register their content templates and ensure conformity with the regulations. This extension will definitely help all the concerns to test all the edge cases and ensure complete implementations in week’s time.
Hope by next week everything will be back to normal.
2 As per the industry sources the consumption of packaged snacks such as ice cream, beverages, chocolates and confectionery have bounced back to pre covid levels, and has even grown in certain categories. The industry is attributing complete recovery of these ‘out of home’ categories to more people travelling to work or leisure, early onset of summer conditions and rise in social events , boosting out of home consumption. Wcovid infections down in most of the parts of the country. The above mentioned categories are going to recover completely during 1st quarter of 2021.. Functions like mariages have started and the summer is early this year in several parts of the country.
Ice cream sales have doubled in this quarter as compared to 1st quarter of 2020, but if you compare considering lockdown conditions in March 2020, the sales have increased by 30% of pre covid levels.. Even sale of Chocolates and chocolate based cookies are also showing the increase in their sales volume, the fact is India snacked more during pandemic.
Even beverage industry is showing sign of recovery, and sales are almost catching up with sale during first quarter of last year.
In fact growth is coming out from smaller cities, towns and rural areas, (for out of home categories) as compared to metros. This might be due to the reason the many of the employees not return to big cities/metros and are still working from homes in smaller cities and towns, and this has given flip to out of home category products.
So it looks like the market out of home category products has recevered fron the pandemic impact, and can look forward to better sales in coming months of this year.
Awaiting your views and comments.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
10th March 2021.